From the Editor - Security

The security message is closing Linux migration deals. Now it's up to us to deliver the secure environment people want.

You can talk about cost savings, performance and
flexibility all you want, but the advantage driving
more and more companies toward Linux is security.
Just look how much time the big cheeses in the
proprietary OS business spend telling the media about
their catch-up plans. Thanks to some bad mistakes in
the design of one vendor's browser and mail client,
CIOs are asking vendors for Linux answers faster than
the vendors were expecting.

Some OSes are born ubiquitous, others attain ubiquity
and Linux is having ubiquity thrust upon it.
Customer pull is nothing new to the Linux vendors, and
they'll cope. And for you, the Linux professional,
it's opening night at the big show. Everyone bought
a ticket to see the amazing singing, dancing, secure
operating system. They're waiting for the curtain
to go up, and you're the stage manager.

Don't panic. Security depends more on policies and
attention to detail than on any program or product.
And you have a secret weapon. As you move more
systems to Linux, you can start enforcing more secure
policies and conceal the changes in the smoke and
mirrors of the OS migration. If anyone points out
that you could relax security to the way you had it
in your old OS, you can say “that's the way
it's normally done under Linux.” Yes, Linux will
get some of the credit for your good decisions,
but you'll get credit for putting in Linux.

Everyone will tell you to run Nmap to keep track of
open ports and get an early warning of unnecessary
or misconfigured software, but when you're keeping
track of thousands of systems, that's a lot of data
to watch. Log your Nmap data to an SQL database with
Hasnain Atique's article on page 56.

Makan Pourzandi and Axelle Apvrille are bringing
security to the Linux cluster environment (page 64).
If you're sharing a cluster among multiple project
teams, have a look.

SELinux is one of the most promising developments
in Linux security, and it's worth keeping an eye on.
No more will an attacker be able to “get root” on a
whole system by compromising one dæmon. I'm planning
to use SELinux at first for simple bastion hosts
such as name servers, then add it to other systems
as the administration tools get better. SELinux is
complicated, though, so watch Linux Journal for more
articles about it. James Morris explains SELinux
and filesystems on page 22.

Finally, we normally don't bother with making fun
of proprietary operating systems, because we're just
quietly replacing them and interoperating with them
where they're still in use. But Marcel Gagné got
a little too annoyed by the latest batch of worms
targeting other OSes that clobbered his network,
so he blew off a little steam with some games on
page 30. Have fun, keep your systems secure and
enjoy the issue.

Comment viewing options

"Several sites noted that migration to Open Source desktops provided an opportunity for revising work practices and operational standards, as well as procedures for administration, system management and security."

The coming years are going to be testing times for GNU/Linux for sure, it can only attract more attention from "evil doers". The Linux community needs to keep, and enforce, the "security as a process" policy we have all practiced since day one, and then educate new arrivals on doing the same.

This is what Linux is all about. I do not know whether we should be happy or sad, that nobody noticed this article. One thing is obvious though, those that care do not advertise their identities, and more importantly do not wish to reveal more than is needed to the flies circling the honey pot.